Transcreation, a Fact of Culture. A Creative Strategy Across Audiovisual Genres

In contrast to the concept of translation as a purely linguistic and mechanical procedure, transcreation is not only a creative process but also a creative service that performs cultural transfers across cultures and languages. Revolving around creativity as its key principle, transcreation is investigated as a fact of culture produced by cultural shifts, adaptation, localisation, and linguistic and visual acts of accommodation as types of rewriting. As a culture-based and creativity-oriented process, transcreation is scrutinised in the context of a corpus composed of TV commercials (Garnier; Haribo) and textual portions of multilingual films accompanied by their Italian dubbed versions (Inglorious Basterds, Director Q. Tarantino. The Weinstein Company/Universal Pictures. USA/Germany. 153 minutes, 2009; Eat, Pray, Love, Director R. Murphy. Columbia Pictures. USA. 133 minutes, 2010). The cultural-conceptual translation (CCT) model is adopted as the theoretical framework within which transcreation is enabled to be perceived as a cultural fact in which source texts are rewritten in the target language according to sociocultural, ideological, and marketing constraints. More specifically, the corpus is interrogated from a linguistic perspective to shed light upon the cultural changes occurring in the transfer from English to Italian. Results will demonstrate that the CCT model functions in international advertising and when dubbing occurs in multilingual films, thereby serving to address issues of cultural conceptualisations at the target level.